It would take Yelp’s lowest-paid employees 333 years to match one year of their CEO’s income
As of 2012, average life expectancy for Americans was 79 years.
How you spend those 79 years varies a lot based on your parents, where you grew up and what you look like.
It also helps to be a CEO, if you can manage it.
Yelp’s CEO, Jeremy Stoppelman, has had some pretty good years.
His combined compensation from 2011 and 2013 was a whopping $15 million.
Meanwhile, some of his lowest-paid employees earn just $22,438 in pre-tax income.
Which means to reap the same rewards their boss does, they’d have to work a staggering 333 years.
That’s a lot of time away from children and other loved ones. That’s a lot of time not working on personal development and personal passions.
You can argue that the CEO of a technology company took some risks and learned some skills that a market might reward. But should those rewards really be a 333:1 ratio of years lived free of survival angst?
That covers four lifetimes of income at the salary of his lowest-paid employees.
Technology is the art of conserving irreplaceable human time through labor-saving innovation. This is a laudable goal in a world where each of us will, one day, meet a painfully definite end.
But when the fruits of these innovations are hoarded so spitefully, with so little regard for the collaborative process of delivering a business, what have we accomplished?
It is a trope of Silicon Valley that technology companies wish to change the world.
Sadly, the world technologists are creating looks more and more to be a dystopian hellscape of crushing income inequality.
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